Slashdot Mirror
Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World?
Veeru writes "As
mentioned on Nova,
my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives
Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight
almost 100 years ago. Scientific
American had rejected
his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers
allowed Amos to publish
the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other
experimenters may not have received the credit
they deserved. I recently realized
that Amos was intent on investigating
the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most
advanced phenomenon he could find. If
Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be
pursuing?"
Those points aside, I have been amazed by the research in nanotechnology and find the realm of mapping the human genome to be interesting as well. Perhaps subjects such as these would interest Amos? Perhaps these are not as obscure as other fields but these are certainly interesting studies.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
Well, if your grandfather were still alive today, I imagine he would be most interested medical technology.
specifically, in the next generation of Viagra, Rogaine, and the technology to keep human heads alive in jars as foretold by Futurama.
You are not your blog
As far out as it seems, there are real efforts in making a time machine. I forget what university was doing the research, but it involves using lasers crossing each other at 90 degree intersects to create a column or vortex of light. While this cannot let them travel back in time, it is theorized it will let particles travel through the time that the machine is turned on. I apologize for the specifics, but am sure the slashdot effect can find the specifics.
As mentioned on Nova, my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight almost 100 years ago.
Score:-1 Buffing my own pole.
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
We are living in an age quite different from 100 years ago. Information travels pretty fast. It is difficult for something that important to remain obscure so long today. Further, people more or less stopped noticing technological advances and taking them for granted. If any individual inventor/scientist gets some success he would want to approach venture capitalists, news papers, journals before he/she turns it into something great and useful. So, in my opinion it is difficult to find something obscure which is great. Yes, it is certainly possible that things people earlier thought wouldn't work becoming something great.
In the 50s and 60s, we were all under the impression that it'd be flying cars, robots and automated kitchens that cooked for you. Robots would be really smart and virtually be home helps.
:o) So maybe, just maybe, we need to revisit some of those older ideas to progress?
None of this has happened.
This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of current nanotechnology and genetic solutions actually being major breakthroughs. It'll be like Moore's Law for technology - things will just progress, rather than achieve sudden overnight success. I mean flying - it's boolean - you fly or you don't fly. Once you've conquered that you can improve on it. Nanotechnology I feel really needs advances in AI and other technology fields which I feel are being neglected - batteries, vision systems, sensors - they all need to improve before nanotechnology takes off big time.
So maybe it's a disparity thing. Maybe we'll be held back in certain areas because other technologies aren't available yet - like Civilization
I think Billy the Bigmouth talking bass would really blow that dudes mind...
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The technologies of the last 200 years have so far outstripped past human progress that the real action in the coming years/decades/centuries will be the philosophical, moral and political assimilation of technology. We've done an increasintly poor job of it as the pace of advancement has quickened; it'll be interesting to see what (if anything) causes a tipping point after which we'll really explore the full impacts of new technologies.
(Disclaimer: I think Bill Joy is an alarmist.)
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Strontium Nuclear Batteries are one. Known about and succesfully demonstrated since the early 90s, a single 5gram piece can put out enough SAFE radiation to be turned almost directly into energy, that it can supply 75 watts for months on end. It's not harmful to animals, it's not expensive, it's no more expensive than sterodent.
It's also a technology that nobody believes has any use because of the words "nuclear" and "radiation"
It'll come soon enough
1. Practical Immortality
(it's right around the corner, hell, we could do it now if not for those damned ethics... that's a joke, son...)
2. Sustainable Fusion
(again, right around the corner. ITER WILL work, and unlimited, non-polluting energy is here... think what that means...)
3. The Ion Drive
(already proven, power being ramped up monthly by orders of magnitude, will open up solar system for exploration, mineral harvesting, golden age begun...)
Dozens more... it's a great, great time to be alive... although many people would have you believe different.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
What about renaming them? MRI (Magnetic Reasonance Imaging) came from NRI (Nuclear RI), renamed because doctors thought patients might not like the word nuclear.
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.
Just a thought, but why doesn't slashdot implement a feature that lists all of the rejected submissions on another page.
Obviously people would submit spam, so the reviewers would also have to have a "spam" (and possibly a "duplicate submission") button as well as a "reject" button.
It would provide an interesting read for all of the smaller bits of news whizzing around that none of us get to see due to the tight reviewing process.
Just look at any technology that appears to almost be magic. This is where the edge is. Bluetooth and WiFi are up there, guesture-based interaction is close. Imagine being able to unlock the door to your house with a (specific) wave of your hand, all worked out using sensors built into a ring or glove and relayed to the house's security system using an encrypted RF data technology. Personal Area Networking is a group of technologies with a lot of potential. There are many more examples, I'm sure.
It's not going to be all that long till governments apply the same principles to "mind persuasion." Yes, the attempts in the past have been laughable, from WWII's Rationing Slogans to the War On Drugs.
But sooner or later they are going to get it right. Just look at DeBeers, who managed to invent an entire social custom wrapped around crystalized carbon. And clear, colorless crystals at that.
No imagine that persuasion in the hands of Uncle Sam.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'.
Hmmm, and you are the great-great-grandson of Mr. Root? I wonder...the reason why all of my good slashdot story submissions get bounced every freakin' time. Maybe CmdrTaco and pals are the great-great-grandsons of those same Scientific American editors!
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
- Enough energy for everyone alive in the world today to live better than the average American presently does.
- More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
- Enough room, sunlight, water etc. for us to feed many times our present population as well as we feed the richest few now.
- Enough room for all of us to spread out and live interesting lives.
What more do you want exactly?-- MarkusQ
The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.
The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.
The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.
However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Brief history:
- Some people came up with a very interesting idea, and called it "Nanotechnology"
- The word got very popular, and so people started calling all sorts of other things "Nanotechnology" in the hopes that some of the coolness would rub off.
- People who knew about the original idea got annoyed by this, and people who didn't know about it fell into two groups: the ones who had no clue said "Gee, buzzwords, swell!"; the more cluefull noticed that the word was being applied to stuff that wasn't all that special and got annoyed without realizing that the orginal idea even existed.
Nanotech (in the original sense--what is now being refered to as eutachtic chemistry and/or machine phase chemistry) is to clasical chemistry what semiconductor technology is to leyden jar and cat fur electrical science. We aren't there yet (and may never be) but the idea doesn't deserve the glib dismissal it gets from the hipply cynical.-- MarkusQ
I think we are still at the very beginning of the information age... I can't imagine what kind of information storage and retrieval devices we will have in 100 years.
I'm not talking star-trek here.. let's look at what is technically feasible now, even if it's not economically viable.
Storing terabytes of information per cubic inch of some material, with picosecond access times.
Communication - Despite regulatory stifling of the internet.. the concept that if we follow standards, and cooperate, we can leverage all kinds of communication mediums, is here now. Speeds are going up and up.. the "last mile" problem is just momentary.
So.. as our ability to store and move information goes up and up.. so what?
We are getting good at digitizing things, too.
Movies. Audio.
3d scanners. Motion capture. Auto-generated 3d meshes from image analysis of 2d images...
Despite no real big noise about it now, there is ongoing progressive work in the field of image recognition.
Teleconferencing.
VoIP.
Wireless... look at what's happenign there. Look how much 802.11b stuff is changing how we think about wireless.. how many mom & pop outfits are providing services over it.. and that's a TINY, TINY slice of spectrum.. what would happen if we REALLY got serious about open wireless communcation?
I think the next big advances are going to be in biology. No, I don't think we're going to live forever in the near future, there's not enough room for healthcare as a percent of GNP to make that a reality. The two big advances are going to be in:
1. Biology for manufacturing. Call your "nanotech" what you will, simulating large scale mechanics at a small scale just has too many problems. However, revamp bamboo to grow me a house, or corals to grow me dishes, and we're talking something that's got a market.
2. Computer interfaces. Right now we've got a few monkeys controlling robotic arms (and world superpowers, but I digress), and there are definitely parallels to be drawn to the world of various gliders and steam powered aircraft that were burgeoning around 1903. Something with huge economic and social potential, that can completely "change the world" in the way aviation promised to, is a moderate bandwidth back that bypasses our current sensory system.
Remember, sensory processing begins at the nerve endings in the sensory organs. Much of your brain's interpretation of what the eye sees is handled in the first few layers of cells in the retina.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
That is not to say you could not produce very vivid images using this new sense. I recall an experiment where researchers were able to teach a blind man to see using pressure transducers on his back. They had a camera that would translate a signal from a black and white CCD into pressure intensities laid out like a grid. The subject was able to adapt that system into a crude form of vision. There are also reports of deaf people who "hear" by feeling the vibrations of speakers, at least enough to enjoy music.
This sense would have to be developed in people. But I could see it as a powerful tool. It would be cool if my car could translate data from proximity radar system into my brain. Instead of relying on mirrors I could "feel" the road around me. Know where the curb is. Sense that Kia in my blindspot. Vibe that cop over the next hill with the radar set.
Would it be sense like we know them? No. Instead it would be sensations the likes of which we had never known before.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Given things we are just learning, from a number of fields that appear initially very far apart, I think we might be able to do some very subtle things to keep people from interpreting what they see in an undesired way, or steer them towards a desired interpretation.
I can imagine this working in a lot of ways, some good, some not so good:
You come to an intersection in a hallway. Even though there are no signs, you are normally not a person with a good bump of direction and you are deep inside a very large building, you immediately get a feeling that left leads towards the shortest route to an emergency exit. Each time you come to another junction, this feeling adjusts to the new location.
You are outside a building. There is an unlocked door there, but unless you are supposed to go inside the building, it looks so uninteresting that you ignore it. If you were actually planning to rob the building, the door looks extremely dangerous in some ill defined way.
A highway crew re-grades a stretch of interstate, and installs some new reflective edging and lane markers. Traffic flow rate increases by 50% and traffic jams during rush hour are greatly reduced. Accident rates drop. Close observation reveals that people planning to use the exits or business bypass-loop are getting over into the best lanes much sooner than before, and are somehow more prone to pick good times to pass or make lane changes.
Obviously, if this is doable, it could also be abused:
"Our country allows free emmigration. These people could leave if they wished. Unless you think they can't see the crossing gate at the border."
"It's funny, but until I made up my mind to vote for Geefler, I hadn't even noticed those new "polling place here ->" signs. They really stand out, don't they."
While all this may sound far fetched, there are already some modest examples. Disney has built a "Tiger Hunt in India" themed ride in one of its parks, and uses decorative pictograms on a mock up crumbling ancient temple to tell a story of a race who angered the generic Disney "mother earth goddess" by ecological shortsightedness. They are punished by natural disasters, and then clean up their acts and the disasters stop happening. While most visitors don't have nearly enough time to puzzle out all the pictograms consiously, supposedly this ride has the lowest littering rate of any ride in the park.
I can see how this might become a much more robust and reliable technology, but given some of the examples, I'm not at all sure I want it to. A lot of it sounds like extensions of what some advertisers are using to overcome resistance to ads, and some of it sounds Orwellian, but either way, it may be possible to go a lot further towards mind control than most expect.
Who is John Cabal?
Science does believe in lifters, but they're just air ion engines, and I have to laugh at the very poor experimental technique and bad logic of those who try to "prove" they're anything but that. Dowsing: you know, anywhere in the part of the midwest I live in, you could jiggle your dowsing rod & be correct, there's a water table everywhere. Cold fusion: very reputable scientists have tried to duplicate the results, but could nothing conclusive found. Just as an aside, at U.of I. some of the senior physics professors did a number of interesting experiments to see if they could find a "fifth force" that some elements supposedly possess, and the reason I bring that up is that you're wrong if you think mainstream scientists will reject new ideas out of hand.
They also refined alot of the math behind the physics. When they first started building their test results didn't match the ones published in the standard book of tables of various aeronautic physics at the time. Turns out the guy who wrote that book was wrong about alot of things and they ended up rewriting everything, fixing equations and the like based on their empirical data gathered.
While it will undoubtedly be argued to death about what constitutes the first "flight", the wrights were far and away the first aeronautical engineers to build a working plane - and continue to build and improve them - on sound physics and principles.
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write a rebuttal or link to one in order to support your point. Personally I welcomed Joy's essay as a counterpoint to the writings of people like Kurzweil who can gloss over the rough spots in the technological world.
Photos.
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality.
This is simply not correct. Time travel does not contradict causality, only some people's concept of "free will".
To explain: You cannot "change" history, simply because it "is already there". The notion of going back and "overwriting" one history with another a la Back To The Future suffers from the "Second Time Around Fallacy". History can by definition not be changed.
History can, however, be influenced by a time traveler. The history we know has been produced by past events, some of which can have been caused by a time traveler. So when I go back, I know in advance that everything I do must be consistent with the history I know. How this is "enforced" is the big question, but I bet a bit of Bayesian probabilities are involved. By that I mean the following: The base probability of various events that may prevent me from killing my grandfather can be very low (e.g. the probability of loosing the gun down a chasm just before I reach his house). However, the conditional probability of these events given that I will not kill my grandfather is much higher. In fact, given that my grandfather most evidently survived my attempt, the only thing to be resolved is how my intended murder was averted. So, if I try, somehow I will fail (and this is where "free will" becomes problematic for some people).
However, I can still influence things in history. For instance, I could go back to look for some legendary treasure that hasn't been found - maybe it hasn't been found because I went back in time to find it before others and move it! The causal integrity is intact.
Two additional observations: The above disregards the possibility of "parallell universes". Conceivably, I could go back in time and start "a different history", i.e. a different universe. Given the current state of our knowledge, we cannot rule out that the universe branches into a finite or infinite number of parallell universes at intervals which could be real or infinitessimal. However, you could never move between those universes, so the integrity of the history of each universe would still be preserved. This means that a time traveler "changing history" would actually just move back to an earlier branching point and go down an alternative history.
Note also that causal loops are quite possible with time travel, and that this does not contradict causality in any way. So you could go back in time and introduce your grandparents to each other (unless you already knew for sure that they introduced themselves to each other).
Screws up your mind, doesn't it?
[I have used past and future tenses here, since Douglas Adams neglected leaving us with a copy of the book on the time travel grammar].
On the other hand, the Centre of the Known Universe is here, in some podunk called Rockall (motto: "There's fuck all in Rockall").
Cherokee Indians claim that the Center of the World (and therefore the known universe) is about ten miles north-northwest of Elberton, Georgia, near a bizarre roadside attraction called the Georgia Guidestones.
According to my deranged ex-fiancee, however, the center of the known universe is wherever the hell she happens to be at the moment. In other words, the center of the known universe is underneath whatever guy she met not twenty minutes ago.
So opinions vary, as do spellings. Personally, I'm going to agree with the aboriginal Americans, because I can get there in about two hours. See, there's nothing like being near the CotKU without actually having to be there. It's kinda like being in the suburbs.
This is not my sandwich.
Arthur C. Clarke posited a statement that has come to be known as Clarke's Law: 'We tend to OVERestimate short-term changes and UNDERestimate long-term changes.' If you look at sci-fi from the 1950's, you see starships that travel faster than light, but all of the astrogation and calculation of co-ordinates being done by teams of humans. They simply didn't foresee 50 years ago that computing power would become too cheap to measure. My Sprint PDA phone has an embedded processor with more computing power than a 50's-era mainframe. This would be simply unfathomable to someone from back then. The problem with foreseeing the future is that most people simply extrapolate from the present, and are unable to anticipate second-, third-, and nth-order effects. That's not how the real world works.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman